Yesterday we put out a new release of Social Squared – version 1.0.0.6 – our enterprise forum solution for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.
The main new feature included in this release is the ability to allow people to anonymously post new topics in an individual forum. This has a few settings so is very configurable:
Authenticated Users
Some organizations want to allow users who are authenticated into SharePoint to post anonymously. A good scenario for this is a company feedback forum where the organization wants to get honest feedback from employees. The feedback may be deemed better if employees can leave the comments completely anonymously.
There are a few settings when allowing authenticated users to post anonymously:
Can create topics – allow authenticated users to anonymously create new topics
Can create replies – allow authenticated users to anonymously create replies to existing topics
Require name – if set a textbox asks the user to enter a name when posting anonymously
Require email – if set a textbox asks the user to enter an email address when posting anonymously
Anonymous Users
If you are running a public facing web site then it is unlikely that everyone that visits the site will be authenticated. Social Squared also allows anonymous visitors to post anonymous topics or replies to forums that are setup for this.
The settings are the same as above, so you can set whether these anonymous users can create new topics, or just post replies to existing ones – and also if they are required to enter a name and email address when posting.
Try it out…
We’ve enabled the Test Forum in Social Squared to allow anonymous users to create new topics and replies, you can try it out here:
http://connect.lightningtools.com/default.aspx?action=ViewTopics&fid=7
Download…
You can download a fully functional trial of Social Squared to try out this functionality from here:
Coming tomorrow…
In the previous release we added the ability to set where the forums would look up the CSS, image, and user control files it uses to render itself. Tomorrow we’ll be releasing a new UI package that changes the look of the forums so it looks great in SharePoint 2010! It is also a great example of how to customize and deploy a custom look and feel for Social Squared.
